About

Why this exists

A photo that has to go somewhere runs into the same three walls: the wrong format, too many megabytes, or more information travelling with it than you realised. Each of those is a small, solvable problem, and the usual solution is to hand your photograph to a stranger’s server. It does not have to be.

The format problem is where the site started, because it is the loudest. Since 2017 an iPhone has saved photos as HEIC rather than JPG — in Apple’s framing, roughly half the size at the same quality, but a format a good deal of software still refuses. So there are tools to turn one into JPG, PNG or PDF, and to simply look at one when seeing the picture was all you wanted.

The size problem has nothing to do with Apple: the file is the right format and still too heavy for an upload form capped at 2 MB or a mailbox that bounces the attachment. So there is a tool that compresses an image to a size you name, and it takes JPG, PNG and WebP as readily as HEIC.

The third is what the photo carries — the date, the camera, the coordinates of where you stood. That is handled inside the other tools rather than as one of its own, and what your photo carries sets out exactly which fields survive a conversion and which do not.

More tools will follow as the same shape of problem turns up. What will not change is where the work happens.

Every free converter for this problem asks you to upload your photos to a stranger’s server, wait, and then trust a sentence in a privacy policy saying the files were deleted afterwards. For a receipt that may be true enough. For family photographs it is a lot to ask, and it is not necessary: a modern browser is perfectly capable of doing the conversion itself.

How it works

Everything happens inside the page, on your own device. Nothing is uploaded, so there is no queue, no size limit to enforce, no account to create, and nothing on a server that could later leak or be sold. The simplest proof is also the most convincing: load the page, disconnect from the internet, and convert anyway.

There is no limit on how many photos you convert or compress at once, and no counter anywhere. They are processed a few at a time regardless of how many you add, so a large batch is slower rather than heavier — though on an older phone a very large one is still a lot to hold. You can also add more photos to a batch that has already finished.

What this site promises

Four things, and they are the point of it rather than a marketing section.

• The tools are free, entirely and permanently. Not a free tier, not the first ten files, not a trial. No part of the functionality will ever move behind a payment, whatever the site grows into.
• Nothing is uploaded. Your photos are read by your own browser and never transmitted. You do not have to take that on trust — the privacy page shows how to check it yourself in about thirty seconds.
• No account, and no conditions. Nothing to register for, no email to hand over, no link to share before you may download, no wait, no counter. You arrive, you use it, you leave.
• Advertising only if the traffic ever demands it, and never on the tools. There is none today, because there is no audience. If it ever appears it will sit on the reading pages, the tools themselves will stay clear, and this site’s privacy policy will be updated before the first ad is served rather than after.

None of this is charity. It costs almost nothing to run: your device does the work, so there are no conversion servers to pay for and no storage bills that grow with use. The site is static files on a CDN. Free is what this architecture naturally is — the promise is simply not to spoil it later.

Who is behind it

One person. There is no company, no team, no investor and no roadmap meeting — this is a solo project, built and maintained by a single developer. That is worth knowing for two opposite reasons. It is why a reply to your email comes from the person who wrote the code rather than a support queue; and it is why a fix can take a fortnight, because there is nobody else to hand it to.

It also explains the shape of the site. A single developer cannot maintain sixty tools honestly, which is why there are six and why each one has been measured rather than assumed.

Tell me what is missing

Missing a tool, or is one of these wrong for the way you actually work? Write to feedback@anywhereimage.com. Every message is read by a person — the same one.

What gets built has to fit four things: it runs entirely in your browser, it needs no account, it stays free, and it can be done properly rather than merely added — this site would rather have six tools that are right than sixty that are approximately right. If an idea does not fit, you get an answer saying which of the four it broke. Not silence.

What I will not do

• Accounts. There is nothing to store, so there is nothing to log in to.
• Conditions. Nothing here is locked behind an email address, a share, a wait or a queue. A tool that asks you for something first is a tool that is selling you.
• Watermarks. A converted photo comes back as your photo.
• Uploads. Not for a “faster” mode, not for a premium tier. The moment files leave your device this site stops being the thing it is.
• Quiet failures. If a photo cannot be converted, it says so, with its own reason, and the rest of your batch still finishes. If a format loses information — a PNG cannot keep the date and location a JPG keeps — the page says that before you convert, not after.

Getting in touch

Corrections and bug reports are genuinely welcome, especially about photos that convert wrongly rather than not at all — those are the ones that look like success and go unnoticed. If you are willing to attach the file that failed, it usually turns a guess into a fix; it is optional, and the contact page says what happens to anything you send and when not to send it. Write to feedback@anywhereimage.com.